1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the area discrimination or extraction of an input image. The present invention relates to the analysis of a color image. The present invention relates to preprocessing for optical character recognition.
2. Related Background Art
Due to the significantly improved processing performance of computers, documentation tools having a high power of expressions have been developed to facilitate the application of colored and diverse documents.
On the other hand, preprocessing for determining a target area for character recognition, that is, the area discriminating technique is gathering attention as an essential technique for conventional documentation tools, for example, OCRs. This is because the use of colored and diverse documents results in complicated layouts, thereby preventing textual areas from being extracted using a simple demarcating technique.
The above area discriminating technique, however, deals only with black-and-white binary images and does not directly cope with colored images. This also applies to general area discriminating techniques. Thus, no color information is reflected in area discrimination and the concept that colors are used as area attributes does not exist, so color information is totally neglected.
Thus, in view of the spread of colored documents and their complicated layouts, existing area discriminating techniques provide insufficient functions for preprocessing for documentation (text processing).